Kundera's Legacy

Leo Robson's Under Western Eyes takes on Milan Kundera's legacy.

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who died earlier this summer aged 94, represented a number of things, but they were all variations – to borrow one of his own favourite words – on the theme of freedom. To the Western readership which embraced his work perhaps as eagerly as that of any non-Anglophone writer during the final quarter of the twentieth century (Marquez was the obvious competitor) he seemed to offer a distinctive, unorthodox and unassailably authoritative approach to novelistic form, literary history and the sanctity of private life. But no less important to Kundera’s project and legacy were the liberties he took, the freedoms he granted himself – from responsibility and rigour, from his obligations to coherence and even reality.

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A greater challenge to Kundera’s legacy than the inevitable loss of modishness may be the charge most extensively levelled by Joan Smith in the ‘Czech mates’ chapter of her book Misogynies (1989). Even Jonathan Coe, having defended him against Smith’s claims, ended his 2015 essay ‘How Important Is Milan Kundera Today?’ with a reference to ‘the problematic sexual politics which send ripples of disquiet through even his finest books’. But this seems not to be the dominant position today. Gina Frangello, writing in the LARB in 2020, acknowledged Kundera’s misogyny only in the course of celebrating his work as a ‘definitive craft book’ on the uses of authorial omniscience. As recently as May – 37 years after the Madonna name-check – the English-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa praised The Unbearable Lightness of Being for its portrayal of sexual relationships.

Have we put ourselves into an ideological straight jacket that ignores humanity?

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